Challenge Mode Gear Procs, Alt Detection, Blue Posts, 25 Death Knights and Heroic DS

Best Buy will be hosting a World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Developer Chat tomorrow, Tuesday, September 18 at 4 p.m. PDT. Lead systems designer Greg Street, lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas, lead content designer Cory Stockton, and lead quest designer Dave Kosak will be on-hand to field questions from anyone who'd like to join in. The event will be held on the Best Buy chat client, so be sure to register for their forums if you'd like to participate.

All questions will be reviewed and answered in a queued format before being published, and community manager Crithto and I will be there to help facilitate things for our developers. Given that our friends at Best Buy are conducting this promotional chat, we expect that it may attract a broad audience of gamers curious about Mists of Pandaria. While we'll make every effort to get to as many questions as possible, we anticipate receiving many questions about the core features the upcoming expansion has to offer.

These gentlemen are outstanding developers and a lot of fun to talk to -- it's sure to be a lovely time. We hope you'll come take part!

Theramore scenario completely underwhelming compared to other pre expansion events. It's Meh.
Was never meant to be a world event. It's the first Scenario of the game. Tons more content coming next week!

So if we're rolling Monk in Mists we won't be able to get the Theramore Tabard or Mini Mana Bomb?
That's correct. They're tied to the level-85 FoS and won't be available after Mists launch.

What's the ETA for Beta going down? Will we get 24 hours notice or just a 15minute shutdown?
I've confirmed the current plan is to keep beta online at least until the launch of Mists of Pandaria on September 25. No major plans that I'm aware of for an event at the end of beta. Maybe some QA shenanigans? No clue. We'll be busy!

Shouldn't a preview be an indication of how fun new content is? Where is the challenge?
Scenarios aren't intended to be particularly challenging endgame content. Similar to old group quests.
Challenge may have been the wrong word, lets try Entertainment. 5 minutes of entertainment is quite small.
Some will be longer than others, but 20-30 min will prolly be about average at launch.

Is there a lockout on scenarios? Or can i run it as many times a day as i want?
Scenarios shouldn't have a lockout. You can run them as often as you'd like

Can you confirm the H:Rag mount drop % reduction once MoP is released?
Yes, the plan is to make the H Rag mount a rare drop in Mists, similar to the Cataclysm changeover and Icecrown.

Beta Class Balance Analysis
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
It's a bit difficult for us as it appears the Blood Boil tooltips have not been updated yet. I'm at work so I can't check in-game, but all the datamining sites still show it as 711-869 + 19.2% AP. I assume that the new BB numbers are 3065 base damage plus 13.45% AP.
There are a few layers of multipliers that get applied to it, but the raw damage before multipliers (at level 90) previously was 711 to 869 plus 19.2% of AP, and now is 3474 to 4244 plus 11% of AP. It was intentionally a scaling nerf.

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
One stack of Dream of Cenarius (damage) is being consumed on an ability miss. Is this working as intended? Is Wild Charge (Caster Form) intended to trigger GCD?
Yes and yes.

Went to test some things on how exactly Ferocious Bite's additional energy consumption works on live servers, and discovered some very odd results when using a Ferocious Bite with Omen of Clarity while energy capped.
We looked at this issue, and it's all server- client timing stuff. What seems to be happening is that when you're at or near full energy, the UI doesn't get the execute energy cost displayed quickly, so it appears to take less than 25 energy. We will try to get it to be more responsive.

The 12% damage reduction added to Thick Hide is not appearing on the tooltip in game, is this simply a tooltip error or did that change get lost somewhere in the miasma of patches?
It should be active. When the most recent patch went out, some of the earlier hotfixes had to be reapplied, but that should be the case now. We will likely have to wait and update the tooltip itself in the future.

Are there any plans to change Wild Mushrooms :Bloom?
We’re keeping an eye on how people use it for now. We don't feel that it's useless as you claim, but it isn't rotational, which you seem to want.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Classes get energy costs associated with attacks at least partially refunded and sometimes fully refunded. For monks, energy is partially refunded and chi is fully refunded.
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Blackout Kick will simply eat the chi cost without dealing damage.
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However, this change affects Mistweavers and Windwalkers.
A hotfix will be going out soon that makes Blackout Kick once again refund Chi on miss / dodge / parry if you don’t know Brewmaster Training (Windwalkers, Mistweavers, and pre-lvl 34 Brewmasters).

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Is Capacitor totem supposed to not be effected by hit rating? It doesn't look like my hit is helping Capacitor totem's effect land on my targets.
It should benefit from your hit chance. We will investigate and fix if needed.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
I tested the Soul Swap glyph earlier this evening and just now at 1:50 am Medivh time on a couple of target dummies and can verify that the glyph is still triggering the SS cd preventing SB/SS from being cast. The game says, "the spell isn't ready".
That’s intended. Glyphed Soul Swapping should still trigger a cooldown, but Soulburned Soul Swapping should not (regardless of glyph).

Seeing strange behavior in channeled spells with ticks (Drain Soul, Drain LIfe, Malefic Grasp, etc).
We’re not seeing this, and it’s not an intentional design.

There is roughly a 2 second delay after the GCD when Soul Swap is off cooldown but not castable.
Okay, here's the poop. During beta, we received feedback that players would hit Soulburn, Soul Swap and then accidentally hit Soul Swap again, which would pull their dots back off the target, and prevent them from putting them back on. To prevent this, we added a hidden delay of 3 sec to prevent you from Soul Swapping to the same target.

However, with the glyph, you actually do want to hit the same target more than once quickly to effectively put dots on two targets quickly.

Our solution is to have the delay only kick in when you aren't glyphed. If you have the glyph, there will be no delay. We should be able to add this tweak easily. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Arena Team Idling
It's quite difficult to accurately measure the number of players that were sitting on high ratings during season 11, this is because it was the last one for Cataclysm and a large number of players were idling in anticipation for Mists of Pandaria. Generally, it is quite rare for us to see large numbers of players that will achieve a high rating and sit there successfully without playing for long periods.

You have to play a certain amount of games a month or whatever across the whole season till the end to be eligible for titles. If you don´t play your rating drops.
This is something that is always under discussion. Rewarding people for not playing is something that we don't like. No matter the rating system that we use it is still going to cause players to try and play the system and not the game itself. This is something we would like to avoid and the reason that it is still heavily under discussion for us. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)